READING THE BOMB

"By threatening extinction, this ultimate antipersonnel device is in essence an antibaby device...the babies who will never be born, those that are queueing up in spectral relays until the end of time." Einstein's Monsters

Recommended Select Annotated Bibliography

                                     

                                  

ALPEROVITZ, GAR. (1995) (The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (Exhaustive, excellent account with the author attempting to end the debate once and for all)

AMIS, MARTIN. (1987) Einstein's Monsters (Blend of esssay and fiction by the award winning British author. Amis would divide human history into Before and After the Bomb)






                                                 

BIRD, KAI and MARTIN SHERWIN. (2006) American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (The personal, political life of the leader of the Manhattan Project)

                                               

                                                 

                

BROWN, ANTHONY CAVE, Ed. (1978) Operation World War III: The American Plan for World War III Against Russia in 1957 (The plan ordered up by President Truman in 1949 with the assumption that Nuclear War would break out between the superpowers by 1957. A once "top secret" document. *If any reader knows of a similar Soviet plan from the Cold War that has been published in book form - please advise in "Comments" section and it will be included here)

                                                   

CIRINCIONE, JOSEPH. (2007) Bomb Scare: The History & Future of Nuclear Weapons (By an expert, featured television commentator, on Nuclear Weapons and their dangerous proliferation)

___________________. (2013) Nuclear Nightmares: Securing the World Before It Is Too Late (The emphasis here - Time is Up!)

                                                 

DeGROOT, GERARD J. (2004) The Bomb: A Life ("I wanted to present the entire life of the Bomb in one volume in order to provide a sense of its size and a feeling for its ubiquity." He's more than done that here. "Reveals everything you ever wanted to know about Nuclear Weapons, including things you were too terrified to ask." - USA TODAY)





                                                 

DOBBS, MICHAEL. (2008) One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Krushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (The 1962 Missile Crisis)




                                                    

FETTER-VORM, JONATHAN. (2012) Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb (The history "lite" in illustrated form, yet striking and informative)




                                                 

GOLSTEIN, DONALD M. (1995) Rain of Ruin: A Photographic History of Hiroshima and Nagasaki




                                                      

HERSEY, JOHN. (1946) Hiroshima (The Classic Account first published in The New Yorker. Widely considered to have altered Americans' perceptions of the Atomic Bombings) *See Blog Post below - Beneath the Bombs of August



                                                 

HAM, PAUL. (2014) Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermath (Major account packed with facts and leavened by the author's humanity) *See Blog Post below - Russia/USSR Factor in US Atomic Bombing




                                                   

                                                 

HASEGAWA, TSUYOSHI. (2005) Racing the Enemy (The author who researched the records and the evidence in Russian, Japanese and American archives and is fluent in all three languages, cites the declaration of war by the USSR as causing Japan to capitulate. Tokyo was not ready to capitulate before Hiroshima nor was it ready to surrender after Nagasaki. "Hasegawa has changed my mind. The Japanese decision to surrender was not driven by the two bombings." - Richard Rhodes)
















                                                      

KAPLAN, FRED. (1983) The Wizards of Armageddon (Reveals the secret world of nuclear strategists, an alarmingly small circle)
                                                   

                                                 
                                                   

LETTOW, PAUL. (2005) Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Reagan's surprising, strong commitment to Abolition, The Reykjavik Summit)




                                                    

LOWN, BERNARD, MD. (2008) Prescription For Survival (A founder of the Physicians' Movement for the Prevention of Nuclear War, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize)



                                                    

                                                      

McNAMARA, ROBERT. (1986) Blundering Into Disaster (On the ever increasing risk of Nuclear War, by the former Sec. of Defense)



                                               

PERRY, WILLIAM J. (2015) My Journey at the Nuclear Brink (From our former Sec. of Defense and one of the Wall St Journal "Op Ed" four, with George Shultz, Sam Nunn, Henry Kissinger who have written of the dangers of Nuclear Weapons today. The book is dedicated by the author to: "our children, grandchildren and great-grandchild who have given me the best of all reasons to continue my work to ensure that Nuclear Weapons are never used again.")



                                                

RHODES, RICHARD. (1986) The Making of the Atomic Bomb
__________________. (1995) Dark Sun
__________________. (2007) Arsenals of Folly
(The Essential trilogy on the A-Bomb, the H-Bomb and the dangerous folly of our continued contemplation of their use)
RHODES, RICHARD. (2010) The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without  Nuclear Weapons (The author's urgent last word on the subject and his hopes for Abolition)




                                                    

ROSENBAUM, RON. (2011) How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III (Chilling, realistic scenarios of The End - unless we do something about the danger soon)




                                                 

SAGAN, CARL. (1990) A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter (From the author and TV host of Cosmos.Groundbreaking scientific study and analysis of the catastrophic effects of even a "limited" Nuclear War - "Nearly all Americans will die."




                                                     

SCHEER, ROBERT. (1982) With Enough Shovels (Presents the absolute lunacy of "Civil Defense" plans in the event of a Nuclear War in the early years of the Reagan administration, later abandoned in favor of abolition summitry and Reykjavik)




                                                 

SCARRY, ELAINE. (2014) Thermonuclear Monarchy (Using, for example, President Nixon's statement at a White House party that he had the power to kill 70 million people in 25 minutes, the author decries that power now vested, unconstitutionally she argues, in the hands of the President of the United States)





                                                   

SCHELL, JONATHAN. (2000) The Fate of the Earth and The Abolition
___________________  (2007) The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of the Nuclear Danger
(Cogent, Passionate, Eloquent. By the late, great author writing to and for all of us. First appeared in The New Yorker, 1982, 1984, respectively)





                               
                                                      

                                             

SCHLOSSER, ERIC. (2013) Command And Control (From the Damascus, Arkansas, Titan II "accident" of 1980 and back and forth in time through our many near Nuclear Weapons Armageddons when nuclear bombs fell from the sky, crashed in planes, and were lost" at sea, among many outrageously dangerous mishaps. Not to mention the numerous "false alarms" and near launches of these weapons. Command And Control is really about the frightening lack of same with our Nuclear Arsenal. A NYTS Bestseller. Now an Academy Award nominated documentary available on DVD)

                                                
SHULTZ, GEORGE. (2015) The War That Must Never Be Fought (Pres. Reagan's Sec. of State and his call for the honoring of the NPT Treaty (Nuclear Non-Proliferation) signed over 40 years ago by the then Nuclear Weapons nations - which calls for a Grand Bargain between the Nuclear Weapons haves and have-nots - Disarmament by the former in exchange for non-proliferation by the latter. The have-nots have kept their part of the bargain but are growing impatient - thus the Marshall Islands Lawsuit against the Nuclear Weapons States.



                                                   

TAUBMAN, PHILIP. (2012) The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb (The "Gang of Five" of Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, William Perry, George Shultz and Sidney Drell, who decided to go public with their call to dismantle the very Nuclear Weapons System that they helped to construct)




                                                  

                                                    

WILLS, GARY. (2011) Bomb Power (How the sheer destructive power of the Bomb has adversely shaped the Office of the Presidency)




                                                

WILSON, WARD. (2013) Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons (Demolishes the main myths that would have us believe that Nuclear Weapons are worth the risk)




                                                     

WITTNER, LAWRENCE S. (1997) Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement (Traces the development of the grassroots international movement for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons)

All of the above volumes can be purchased from the usual suspects: B&N, Amazon, ABE Books, assorted "market place" booksellers on line, or can be found at your local library.

BE INFORMED. POST YOUR POSITION. TALK ABOUT IT. TWEET ABOUT IT. COMMENT HERE.

THE GREATEST IS GONE

"I read the news today, oh boy." If you are of an age to know those words from John Lennon's "A Day in the Life", you are of an age to have had Muhammad Ali as an iconic part of your life. Most of us "read the news" this morning after hoping he would last one more round through the night. Larger than Life. Mourned in death. Farewell and Rest In Peace

Highly Recommended:
WHEN WE WERE KINGS, Academy Award winning documentary on "The Rumble in the Jungle" George Foreman fight. Appearances by Norman Mailer and George Plimpton. On DVD



THE FIGHT, Norman Mailer, (1975) the author's book on the Ali upset of Foreman. Hard to find a better match than Mailer's words with Ali's skills in the ring and larger than life image.

KING OF THE HILL, Norman Mailer,1971, but printed again as the first essay in Mailer's EXISTENTIAL ERRANDS, 1972. The author, this time, on the titanic first Ali-Frazier fight at Madison Square Garden: 

KING OF THE WORLD, (1998) David Remnick, easily the best book I've read on the Champ by the New Yorker editor/writer.

"..the punch he (Ali) let go in the fifteenth came in like a wrecking ball from outer space." (Mailer on Ali's miraculous, fight-winning round 15 Knock Out against Oscar Bonavena to set up the Ali-Frazier Fight)

Note to Readers: Returning to regular blog posts next week. Thank you.

CLICKING DELETE: NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND THE END OF OUR WORLD

At Hiroshima the President laments the "technology" that led to the atomic bombings and that has brought us to the Nuclear Precipice:
"The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires moral revolution as well." He mentions a "future that we can choose" and "the start of our own moral awakening."

Sorry, Mr President that is NOT the solution to the problem.We cannot change who we are as human beings. We cannot change our nature nor do we have the time for such a "revolution". Nuclear Weapons Must Go and they must go NOW. 

"The indefinite combination of human fallibility and Nuclear Weapons carries a high risk of potential catastrophe."-Robert McNamara, former Sec of Defense

We carry these catastrophic weapons with us like sidearms with unlocked triggers. Warheads on hair trigger alert. They are with us when we sleep, when we awake, when we head out for the day with the belief that our homes, our families and our world will be there when we return. On those two awful August days in 1945 the people of those cities did the same. We know what happened. It will happen again to all of us next time and to all of the unborn generations IF we continue in our cozy complacency.

"It's amazing that we're all still here."-Dr. Helen Caldicott, anti- nuclear weapons advocate

While we may agree with Martin Luther King that the "moral arc of the universe is long", we must realize that in this case it will not be long enough.We cannot keep kicking the Nuclear Weapons can down that dead end road. Everyday that we do so is a "hold your breath and hope for the best day."
President Obama's words are empty. Devoid as they are of any specific measures to end these holocaust creating Nuclear Weapons in our time. In fact, he is proposing just the opposite - an inane, insane "modernization" program for these killer weapons.

Winston Churchill once spoke of "the long lamentable catalog of human crime." Knowing our history of endless warfare, genocide and Holocaust who can honestly believe that these horrific weapons will never be used. 
That a world leader somewhere, sometime, will not Click on the final DELETE button. Yes, that fast! Everything over and ended with a keyboard click. Whether by design or by accident or miscalculation - will not matter.

"The world was not meant to be a prison in which man awaits his execution." President John F. Kennedy

Nuclear weapons are sui generis. There has never been anything like them.
"Weapons like this have never existed before in history and they cannot be allowed to exist. If we do not get rid of them, sooner or later they will be used." Mikhail Gorbachev, former Premier of USSR and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, interview August 2015

From Pope Francis, speech at the United Nations, Sept 2015:
"The urgent need for a world free of Nuclear Weapons with the goal of a complete prohibition of these weapons."

Be informed. Read. Think. Watch. Post. Tweet. Share. Comment.

NUCLEAR WEAPONS ABOLITION IN OUR TIME

BEYOND HIROSHIMA: THE ABOLITION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN OUR TIME

USSR 50 Megaton Nuclear Bomb 1961

OBAMA'S VISIT:                                                                                                                                  

This much we know. That President Obama will visit Hiroshima on May 27. He will say a few words. Then he will leave.                                                                                                                          
But we know, too, that the nightmare of Nuclear Weapons will follow him home like his shadow, in the shape of the "nuclear football" of codes, a shadow no President of the United States can ever shake. Computer codes that empower this one individual, and soon his successor, to set in motion a concatenation of nuclear weapons detonations that would annihilate humanity and our world as we know it - killing us, our children, grandchildren and generations yet unborn who will never have the chance to be born. An Abortion of all future generations.
The Fate of Billions in the Hands of One Person.                               Hiroshima is about the past. Burned in stone it cannot be undone. Contentious disputes about military necessity and morality are arguments without end. Time to move past it. Time to secure our future. BEYOND HIROSHIMA.
One day, hopefully soon, we will be able to look our children and grandchildren in their smiling, trusting faces knowing that the Nuclear Sword of Damocles no longer hangs by a thin, hair-trigger thread over their lives and their future.
The Crisis, and it is a Crisis, in terms of destruction, death and doomsday and in terms of Time. Urgency.
The ULTIMATE 911 CALL.     
Picture sand running through an hourglass. Since Hiroshima each generation has, with much luck, been able to turn the hour glass upside down to let the sand start running again. Giving us more time to rid ourselves of this threat of final annihilation. The Crisis is that this generation's turn of the hourglass could well be the last. Out of Time!
Know the enemy. The Weapons Themselves. Today nine nations possess an estimated 15,695 Nuclear Weapons with over 90% held by Russia and the United States.
Ignorance is not an option here. The stakes are too high. We have a civic duty and a moral responsibility to, at the least, be informed. Talk about it. Write about it. Tweet. Post. Take a position. For generations this danger has been out of sight and out of mind. But suddenly, now, there is an opening. Prompted by our presidential election cycle and by world events-Nuclear Weapons Are In The News.
Long buried in the deep waters prowled by submarines stocked with nuclear missiles designed to obliterate entire cities. Buried in the silos of our plains and in Russian Siberia. Buried deep in our consciousness like a traumatic memory or a terrible nightmare. Long dormant in the public's consciousness, now surfacing again.    

"Millennials" this is your time, your life, your future. You have no memory of the nuclear bombing of Japan. No memory of fall-out shelters, of gigantic radioactive mushroom clouds in our atmosphere, of the USSR's 50 Megaton blast, the biggest in history, over the Arctic Circle (1500 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined), of "duck and cover drills" in classrooms. You don't want to be the last generation with its hands on that hourglass when the sands of time run out.You have gathered huge crowds to demonstrate and protest on issues of importance to you. You need to do that here but on a much larger scale. Take heart! There is precedent.



                                                      

In a world without social media, a Million Americans gathered in New York's Central Park in June, 1982, (above) in the largest political demonstration in American history to protest an out of control Nuclear Weapons arms race driving the world to the abyss of Nuclear War. 2,300,000 Americans signed the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Petition presented to both the U.S. and Soviet governments. This spurred ballot initiatives on "The Freeze" in ten states involving one-third of the electorate. The proposal passed in nine of the ten states. Followed in 1986 by President Reagan's meeting in Reykjavik with Russian Premier Gorbachev to find a solution to the Nuclear Weapons dilemma. At the last moment, they blinked at the possibility of complete and total abolition. A lost opportunity of historic proportions. Yet, the meeting did open the door to major Nuclear arsenal reductions by both sides even during the height of the Cold War.
Now is the time for thinking "outside the box." Radical new thinking required to end this scourge of humanity.

ABOLITION IN OUR TIME.

"They" will tell us that it cannot be done. As President John Kennedy said - "We made the weapons and we can do away with them."
Time to face down this global, imminent threat to the Future. Apathy has no place here. We are at our Nuclear Rubicon. Why?
Because our nation and other nuclear nations are embarking upon a new, even more dangerous Nuclear Arms Race. They call it "modernization." 
We have the opportunity now to let these aging weapons systems die at last a natural death. Instead, our governments are not just keeping them on life support, but are injecting trillions of dollars into a new generation of these Killer Weapons. Sleek, stealthy, tempting to actually use! Even "AI" versions of our current Nuclear Warhead delivery systems are in the works.

Does it seem overwhelming? Well, you can just turn away. Be in Denial. Close your eyes and your minds. Sit back and relax. Play with your phones, watch your screens. Detach from it all. Remain willfully, immorally ignorant. And pretend that nothing at all is going to happen to us...Forever.

"Today the danger of some sort of nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was during the cold war and MOST PEOPLE ARE BLISSFULLY UNAWARE OF THIS DANGER." William J. Perry, former Secretary of Defense

We must choose now. You, we, have an amazing power. The power to refuse. The power to say HELL, NO! to modernization of these weapons. HELL, NO! to crossing that Rubicon into the abyss of Nuclear Annihilation which would be sure to come for us. Decide Now That You Will Not Be Silenced! That You Will Be Heard! ABOLITION IN OUR TIME! There May Be No Other.

This Blog will post at least once per week. Info on books, websites, news, opinions, films concerning this Imminent Nuclear Threat to Us All. Thoughtful comments are certainly welcome.

                                                                                                  

BENEATH THE BOMBS OF AUGUST

This is our last look back at books concerning the atomic bombings of Japan from our vantage point 70 years later.

We discuss here two books by Charles Pellegrino. But the two books are really one.

The first titled: THE LAST TRAIN FROM HIROSHIMA:The Survivors Look Back, published - then "pulped" by Henry Holt in 2010.

The second titled: TO HELL AND BACK:The Last Train From Hiroshima, published this month by Rowan & Littlefield.

             

                           
In a previous Post, July 6, we mentioned the controversy that greeted the publication of Pellegrino's 2010 book which led to the pulping and recall of that book by Holt.

We are not discussing here the political factors involved in that decision and the controversy that led to it. But we can briefly compare and contrast parts of the two versions/editions of Pellegrino's book.

The new book TO HELL AND BACK features new reporting and new testimony from atomic bomb survivors who stepped forward to be heard as a result of the public attacks on the 2010 book.

This time the author has provided us with extensive, academic-style footnotes - 352 Footnotes in all. This is in contrast to the 2010 edition which featured only an essay style "Notes" section of a few pages.

The chapter titles remain the same. 

The new book contains a "Preface" and a "Foreword."

The new edition contains extensive black and white line drawings - the 2010 edition only had a few of these illustrations.

The new edition eliminates some inaccuracies as well as a questionable source witness that Pellegrino relied on in the first book.

For a brief but thorough summary (which also defends the author) read the "Foreword" by Steven Leeper.

For example, Pellegrino admits that he was deceived by one "witness". This became "the Fuoco furor" as it was termed at the time of the erupting controversy. But a perusal of the new edition, along with the old, shows that the approximately five pages of Joseph Fuoco's "story" (he claimed, falsely, to have been a flight engineer aboard the Hiroshima photo plane) have been eliminated.

Another example is the person of "Father Mattias" who Pellegrino later acknowledged to be a composite of several Catholic priests. In the new edition he places the name "Mattias" in quotation marks, and in the "Acknowledgments" section states that the priest's name was "changed by request and by contractual agreements going back as far as 1986." This kind of ambiguity only confuses the issue.

In HISTORY AS STORY we compare and contrast non-fiction history books with fiction books concerning the same subject, events, place and time. It appears that the author here had used the novelistic device of merging several characters into one.

An issue that received much attention in 2010 was/is the author's connection to renowned movie director James Cameron (Titanic, Terminator, Avatar). Cameron claims Charles Pellegrino as a friend and Pellegrino has worked with the director on several of his films.

Cameron defended his friend from attacks leveled on him over the 2010 book. In fact, now the director appears in an added section of TO HELL AND BACK in a scene depicting his emotional visit with Mr. Yagamuchi, who was a double hibakusha - that is a survivor of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki- at his hospital bedside in December 2009.

The phrase "last train from Hiroshima" in the book titles refers to the final train that left atomic-bombed Hiroshima and headed to Nagasaki where those people on the train found themselves beneath a second atomic bomb three days later, August 9, 1945.

"I had no choice but to come here and meet you." Cameron told Yagamuchi. The director has told of being haunted by childhood fears of growing up with a fear of nuclear holocaust. See Terminator 2 and its harrowing, criticized by some, nuclear apocalypse "playground scene."

"I believe you experienced both atomic bombs for a reason, making you a link in the chain of human memory." Noting that the hibakusha survivors are now very aged - Yagamuchi 93 at the time of Cameron's visit - the director continued "It's the rest of the world that has to try and remember for them. So now it is up to us to do something about it, and to everyone of good conscience to do something about it."

Yet, despite his purchase of the film rights to the book in 2010 and a promise to Yagamuchi to make a film about the August Atomic bombings, it remains unclear whether the film will ever be made. (See "Foreword)

The new edition contains an emotionally wrenching story of one of the "lost boys" orphaned by the bombings. As a teenager one of them is ostensibly offered employment in the U.S. as part of an American effort to assist these orphans. In heartbreaking reality, the boy is, in effect, "kidnapped" to be used as "a guinea pig."

"I was an experiment in the hands of doctors acting in the name of radiation research." With no family to help him, he was confined to a California mental hospital where he describes the "treatment" as "torture" including bone marrow sampling and spinal taps which continued for weeks until his "case" was heard by a judge who had him released to a nurse who had intervened on his behalf against the doctors in charge of the program. The boy called her his "guardian angel" and she, Mary Furr, in fact, became his legal guardian. He credits her with saving his life and changing it for the better. "Her caring began to thaw a heart frozen by hatred and revenge."

The boy grew into the adult Mr. Thomas Tanemori and in another new section of the book he has a bitter, somewhat shocking encounter with Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets. 

Some 56 years after the atomic bombings, in 2001, Tibbets was traveling the country giving "lectures" about his atomic bomb mission. One lecture was given near the site of the Trinity Test in New Mexico not far from history's first nuclear explosion.

During his speech Tibbets had peppered his remarks by referring to the Japanese as "Japs" and by using derogatory expletives to describe them. The now elderly Mr. Tanemori approached the podium and attempted to question General Tibbets (then himself in his mid eighties).

"With all the facts we have now - would you obey the order, or would you refuse?"

In reply Tibbets "yelled, shaking a finger in Tanemori's face and uttering something horrible, before pushing Tanemori forcefully to one side and commanding his entourage, "Let's go!'

Tanemori's response as Tibbets walked out: "General Tibbets, I pray for you, until you find peace in your heart!"

The recommendation here is to read Pellegrino's new edition - TO HELL AND BACK. It is a needed addition to the powerful pantheon of books on this still troubling and important subject.

Read On.

RUSSIA/USSR FACTOR in US ATOMIC BOMBINGS OF JAPAN

See Paul Ham's book HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI, St. Martin's Press, August 2014, available now in paper back.

APPENDIX 9: "Pentagon's Estimated Bomb Requirements for Destruction of Russian Strategic Areas," SEPTEMBER 1945.

The chart lists Russian/Soviet cities and the "No. of Bombs" needed for the destruction of each. For example, Moscow: 6, Leningrad 6, etc. for a total of 66 Cities with 204 Bombs needed to destroy them.

What is striking is the date: SEPTEMBER, 1945. 

ATOMIC BOMBINGS 70th ANNIVERSARY

HIROSHIMA by John Hersey (1985 ed.)                                                                                                                                                 BLACK RAIN by Masuji Ibuse (1969)                                                                                                                                                       

Japanese Constitution: (1947)                                                 

"The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes."                                                                                                                                                                      Hiroshima(with "target bridge")

There is a bit of a literary and historical paradox when we read these two excellent and important books.                                   Hersey's HIROSHIMA is a non-fiction work that employs some of the techniques of novel writing. It is considered to be a "classic."                                                                                             Ibuse's BLACK RAIN, less well known in the U.S., is a novel written in almost documentary style drawing as it does upon factual source material.

Into the boiling cauldron of Hiroshima Mr. Hersey drops six "characters", though real people, at the exact moment of the Bomb blast. We read and read on following the trail of his sentences as he makes us know the horrors they witnessed and endured and makes us know them - as people, individual human beings - through vivid description and dialogue, their actions and reactions. What they thought and did that morning, at that historic moment, and beyond to Hersey's return in 1985 for his follow-up chapter "The Aftermath."                                                    

"The lives of these six people who were among the luckiest in Hiroshima, would never be the same."                                               

Through empathetic and novelistic writing Hersey makes us care very much about these individuals and the fate of each one of them. We experience them not as abstractions but as living, breathing, suffering, enduring human beings.                                    

HIROSHIMA originally appeared in "The New Yorker" magazine on August 31, 1946, and filled the entire issue. His reportage was a "game-changer" - the first close-up look of the people who survived the Bomb at or near Ground Zero. Personal portraits brought into sharp focus through his skillful use of fiction techniques and simple, powerful sentences.                 

In place of the celebration and relief, anger and for some guilt, felt by Americans in 1945, he tried to provide empathy and closure for his American readers. Gently prodding them to consider again what happened on August 6, 1945 at 8:15 a.m. to the people of Hiroshima and their city.                           

A German Catholic priest, one of his six survivors, tells Hersey that he had to repeatedly remind himself after the bombing: "These are human beings."                                                 

When we read this sparely written, densely factual book, our empathy is engaged. From his pen we learn a few simple, terrible things:                                                                                   That if you wore black that morning, you likely died instantly as dark clothing conducted the Bomb's incredibly intense heat directly into your skin and body. He describes the decorative flowers on women's kimonos as being turned into shadows burnt into their skin.White clothing reflected the heat away from you and you survived at least for a while.                             "Small items of chance or volition meant the difference between life and death."(how you were dressed, whether you were facing away from the blast at that split second or had bent down to pick something up so that a low wall shielded you from the blast).                                                                                                 

Like the American author, the Japanese writer, Mr. Ibuse, was not present in Hiroshima when the Bomb dropped from that blue morning sky its flash-bang detonation quickly burnishing it black while turning morning into near night.                                  

Mr. Ibuse wrote the book separated from his subject by time and place. But as a native of Hiroshima he is as close to his subject as his own mirror. This novel reads as fiction, as it should, though his translator, John Bester, notes in his "Preface", that much of the time it can be read as a "documentary novel" drawn from actual events, records and interviews.                                                 

The journal/diary of Mr. Shizuma provides the author with his chief source of material and did and still does exist. The translator tells us that the novel "is a portrait of a group of human beings; of the death of a great city." That "Against the threat of universal destruction, he sets a love for, and sense of wonder at life in all its forms."                                                                      

Both authors write of the sense of mystery and puzzlement felt by the people of Hiroshima concerning what had happened to them and their city.                                                                                           

Hersey writes of people being bewildered, dazed and apathetic. "They could not comprehend." Plants, he tells us, soon appeared to be growing fast everywhere as if energized by the Bomb. "Wild flowers were in bloom among the city's bones."   Ibuse's characters note the same phenomenon that the "bomb seemed to have encouraged the growth of plants...at the same time that it put a stop to human life." And he writes of their confusion about the "black rain" itself that was neither paint nor tar but "something of unknown origin."                                                                       

Both writers also note the overwhelming sense of the suddenness of it all. That everything happened all at once. 

Ibuse's narrator poses the question "Whatever can have happened for everything to be like this all at once?" One of Hersey's survivors wonders how so many could be "killed or doomed at one blow"and be "so suddenly sick?" Hersey states that the people of the city, in his view, "were the objects of the first great experiment in the use of atomic power." 

Both the novelist and the reporter allude to the ABCC, Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission set up by the U.S. and composed of American and Japanese medical personnel. Each stresses that the ABCC offered no help or assistance to the people of Hiroshima affected by the Bomb. The mission was "to carry out studies and gather statistics" but "it did nothing to treat them." (Ibuse)

Hersey concurs writing that this led the victims of the Bomb to feel "that the Americans regarded them as laboratory guinea pigs or rats." Alleviation of their suffering was not part of the mission mandate.                                                                               

Hersey relates the appearance in May 1955 on the hit television show "This Is your Life"of Enola Gay Co-Pilot Capt. Robert Lewis who tells the show's host that in his pilot's log:"I wrote down the words. 'My God, what have we done?' "                                                                                                                     

In his final chapter Hersey tells us that one of his survivors, Rev. Tanimoto of the Methodist Church published a memorandum in Saturday Review magazine, March 1949, quoted by Hersey:                                                                             "The people of Hiroshima... know themselves to have been a part of a laboratory experiment." But "...they have accepted as a compelling responsibility their mission to help in preventing further similar destruction anywhere in the world...."                       

The memo proposed a "peace park" for the city to "serve as a laboratory of research and planning for peace education throughout the world...."                                                                   After many delays the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park was erected in the center of the city. And there, today, seventy years after the bombing, there will be a peace ceremony.                                                                     

In 1957 the Japanese Diet passed laws to provide medical and other assistance to the hibakusha atomic bomb survivors listing four categories of victims. Hersey lists the four categories, but I quote here only the 4th and last: 

"Those who had been embryos in the wombs of women" in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time of the bombings.                          

Both writers touch on the morality of the subject they write about. It appears to be the proverbial "elephant in the room."                                                                                  

"Who cared after all which side won? The only important thing was to end it all as soon as possible: rather an unjust peace than a just war." (Ibuse)                                                                                                                                                                                     "The crux of the matter is whether total war is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result?" (Hersey quoting the German Catholic priest, one of his 6 survivors)                                                          

Finally, John Hersey's comment on the jacket of Ibuse's book can apply to both books:                                                                 "This painful and very beautiful book gives two powerful messages - of drastic warning, yet also of affirmation of life."                  

We end as we began this Blog Post with Japan's "pacifist" Constitution and a headline from the July 17, 2015, issue of the NYTS:"Japan Moves To Allow Military Combat For First Time in 70 Years."(Regarding the efforts of PM Abe to "reinterpret" the Japanese Constitution).                                                                              

Have THEY forgotten? Have WE? Did the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty of the early sixties clear our skies - but cloud our memories? Out of Sight and Out of mind? What should we think, feel, do?                                                                                       

Thoughtful comments welcome. Read On.